Military Spending Cuts: Depends on what the Meaning of ‘On the Table’ Is

Deficit pressure has put “everything on the table” for cuts, including the Pentagon. Everyone from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to President Barack Obama agrees on this. But what they mean by this is all over the map.

The budget Obama will present to Congress next week will likely begin what the Pentagon is billing as $78 billion in cuts to its budget over five years. In fact these are cuts to their plans for expansion, i.e., slowing a proposed increase is being defined as a cut.

While both Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan pay lip service to the “defense is on the table” mantra, both also exempt the defense budget from their budgetary restraining actions: a five-year discretionary freeze, in Obama’s case, and $100 billion in cuts, in Ryan’s.

The president’s debt reduction commission proposed real cuts, but these would leave the military budget only 5 percent below where President Reagan jacked it up to militarily defeat the Soviet Union — shortly before its collapse.

Let’s define budget cuts as spending less next year than this year. Nothing else should qualify.

Savings aren’t just needed because of the nation’s massive debt. We also need to address our security deficit. The civilian and uniformed military leadership agrees on a key point: U.S. foreign policy needs to be less dominated by the military. Achieving that goal would entail decreasing the proportion of resources devoted to offense (the military) relative to defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military foreign engagement). IPS will score this proposed budget’s mix of security expenditures, and report the results after Obama releases it.